Chapter 6
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“The Horror of Our Love” by Ludo
Hand in burning hand with Bas, I outrun myself.
I leave my worries in the woods, my constantly simmering rage, the itching, impending doom that dogs me with every new house, new school, new state.
We wander the autumn-draped neighborhood like colorful ghosts, the red string of fate looped between us ear to ear, brain to brain, music beating in our blood, in the shared heartbeat we don’t have.
At least until tomorrow. Until the magic wears off and the logic sets back in.
But today, it starts to rain, and Bas tugs me into a run, sprinting for the nearest corner store.
We tumble inside in a heap of tangled legs and wet fabric, palms slapping filthy linoleum, and I can’t stop laughing even after I slip-scramble onto my feet again.
You know, I can’t remember the last time I laughed?
This isn’t even funny, really. It’s stupid stuff.
Kid stuff. There’s nothing this corner store has that’s worth skipping school for.
A couple shriveled hot dogs ceaselessly turn in the motorized grill, sending up a stink of burnt oil and old meat.
Too-early Christmas decorations twist on paper clips from the stained drop ceiling, trying so hard to ward off October and its “thinning veil.” But somebody pinned a greasy, sun-bleached plastic mistletoe to the bell above the door and Bas steals the opportunity, lunging, his lips glancing a blow across my cheek before he dives away, retreating into the candy aisle.
I smell earth, deep and freshly turned. Hear the ghostly spring song of ice cracking on a thawing river. More hallucinations.
My head spins, throat catching. My cheeks heat. I can’t breathe. I can’t think.
God, what a relief.
I catch him in the junction between packets of peanuts and off-brand chocolates.
He digs out handfuls of coins from more pockets than a person should reasonably have; I ferret out a beat-up ten.
Between the two of us, we fill my carpetbag with chips and candy, spill back outside under the disapproving eye of the cashier, tearing packages with our teeth.
Sour straws bared, we sword fight in the drizzle until even Bas’s gray curls stick flat to his forehead, rain dripping into his eyes, catching in the corners of his grin.
All the poorly timed Christmas decorations in the world can’t ward off the dying season around us.
Cardboard wreaths tap against the convenience store windows, caught in the heaters’ thready sighs, but death doesn’t notice.
Doesn’t care. We leave the parking lot with mortality haunting our every leaf-crunching footstep.
A gauzy procession of ghosts drifts idly in our wake, indistinct dreamers drawn off course by our noise, our life, the electricity in my MP3 player and every electric strike of fingers, arms, my icy forehead to his burning temple as we bend our heads together, shielding our music from the rain.
Bas scrolls through a playlist I made with death on the brain, and when he smiles at me, lips and teeth stained blue, I’ve never felt more alive.
The first few notes of a song spike between us, louder than the ocean in my ears.
My rib cage cracks, threatening to break, swelling with something stranger than a heartbeat, worse than butterflies.
Moths, maybe. Moths for a couple of dead kids.
Moths drawn to his light, the sizzling sparks in every offhanded comment and grin and hands that constantly seek mine—he doesn’t even notice he’s doing it—reaching for me every time we part, magnetized.
Something bubbles in my gut, and my mouth tastes like ozone and the green surprise of growing things.
Tastes like history class, the bubblegum electricity stretching between us.
The way he looks at me, warm and… and sure—like he knows me, I’m a certainty, he believes in me as much as he believes in gravity—fills me with bravery.
Jolting forward, I close the distance, drag him in by his hoodie strings and kiss him. Lightning strikes in the press of my lips against his, chapped but soft, lingering blue raspberry sour-sweet.
(Hot, harvest sap wind trickling into a cool, open mouth of stone.
Water laughing down, down, down in the heart of the earth.
Sandals snapping at a trailing hem, gravel gritty underfoot.
Footing shivery, skittering on shale, too eager and breaking into a run.
Down into the depths and deeper. Hurry. Almost—)
Bas’s spine snaps to attention, a fighter at the bell. His palms cup my cheek, fingers tilting my jaw. His skin should feel cooler in the rain, but the fire in him ignites me. I can’t breathe so I stop trying. When the world spins, I shut my eyes. We part, gasp, meet again—
(—home.)
Some deep-rooted self-preservation instinct sends us sagging backward, gulping in air.
I didn’t pop my party trick, but it still feels like plummeting back into my body.
My eyes sting, the force of the un-memory streaming tears down my cheeks.
I hide it in the rain, tipping my reddened face skyward.
For a minute, I can’t speak, my chest too full of the shape of things I can’t put words to.
The scent of dark places, anticipation blooming into bone-deep welcome, and a taste in my mouth not quite blue raspberry.
Darker, sharper, a sweet-sour that’s almost bitter and terribly alive, umami nostalgia.
Distantly, I think, Something’s wrong with me, but even in my head, it feels like a lie.
Something is right with me. A broken bone finally set. Infection wiped from a wound that can now heal.
Bas’s fingers climb my jaw, tipping my head back down so he can meet my eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but the way he stares is almost worshipful, and the girl he must see when he looks at me—
I’m too big. A glorious, massive thing. All-encompassing. My skin is a too-small dress about to split down the seams, and whatever falls out won’t be human.
Whatever falls out will be ravenous.
Light flickers in the corner of my eye. I jerk my head to find us surrounded by ghosts. Way more than I’ve ever seen in one place. They circle us, filling the sidewalk, crossing the abandoned lot in a tide, a whole swarm of tiny, bright little sparks no taller than my knees.
They’re not… supposed to follow. Mom practically called me crazy when I told her I thought they watched me, wouldn’t look at me for an entire week afterward, but this is so much more—this is undeniable.
There’s no scientific scapegoat here, no barely plausible explanation to throw under the bus.
The bioelectricity of two kids isn’t enough to kite a swarm this far off course.
And my MP3 player—an ancient model with metal shielding on its battery compartment—doesn’t cast off enough energy to feed a mouse.
This isn’t natural. It isn’t normal. They’re following us.
Following me.
We should run.
The thought occurs to me like it belongs to someone else. Teachers used to drill us in elementary school—stop, drop, and roll; know your emergency exits; ghosts too close—but the ghost spray in my pocket might as well be miles away.
Secure in the circle of Bas’s steady arms, I forget to fear.
I stare into the sea of ghost lights, and suddenly I’m falling backward in time, an archaeologist sifting ancient wreckage.
I sort through their hazy blue outlines, finding and refining the watercolor sketch of fast feet, digging claws, hungry mouths with plant-culling teeth.
Desperate, driven by an instinct I don’t understand, I hunt down every detail.
I’ve never tried anything like this before—can’t be sure I’m even really doing anything at all—but I…
I swear I’m helping. They can barely remember but I remember.
I look into the blue lights, seeking out the memory of their lives, and my recollection defines them.
Field mice solidify into soft, scurrying blurs.
Moles and voles push their shoveled feet out of the field.
Broken from their death loops, raccoons finally make it across the road.
A cat oozes around a pile of old cement bricks.
An opossum peeks its pointed nose through the weeds.
Shivers rattle down my spine, my head turning before I mean to move, attention dragged like I heard someone calling my name.
Heartbreakingly, down the distant sidewalk, the shambling outline of shoulders hazes toward us, the memory of human feet striking the pavement.
Just two—worn thin and very old—but gaining a certain kind of focus, moving with purpose.
I should run. I should douse the ground in salt, leap over the smaller ghosts, and flee.
But I don’t move. I could—hand in hand with Bas, his warmth seeps into me and I feel every burning finger’s outline—but I just…
don’t. Something about the weight of their eyes on me: their attention feels like responsibility.
Seized by a bone-deep need to answer, to wait, to witness, I let them approach.
“Why are they following us?” I whisper. “What do they want?”
A hypothetical question, clearly, but Bas answers anyway. “Ancients used to give ’em offerings,” he says with a shrug, rifling his pockets. “Maybe they’re hungry.”
I glance sideways, tearing my attention from the swarm to scan his face.
I expect fear, anxiety, revulsion, but instead I find a kind of pain that matches mine, his smiling mouth for once bracketed down in an unshakable kind of grief.
But he doesn’t flinch from it like everyone else.
He takes his time, looks every approaching ghost in what remains of their faces, and gestures for me to hand him my carpetbag.
Reaching in, he pulls out a dollar bag of off-brand milk caramels like it’s the answer to the question I swear I feel in this sea of dead and pleading eyes.
“Grandpa candies?” I ask, the words catching in my throat.